One panicky bride ended up in the hospital on her wedding day after many thought she lost her mind, but the truth turned out to be far creepier.
The mother of the bride, Kelly, told Dr. Edward Panacek she feared her daughter, who was due to be married that day, was suffering from hallucinations and anxiety, LittleThings reports.
She feared her daughter had lost her mind and wanted her to undergo a psychiatric evaluation.
Yet Panacek did not think Kelly had a mental issue.
Inspecting the back of her head, he said, “My suspicions were confirmed.”
Kelly was not crazy, but her scalp did have a centimeter-long botfly larvae growing inside a lesion, causing her strange symptoms.
Panacek learned a mosquito bit Kelly while in Costa Rica for her bachelorette party, and that she covered the scab with petroleum jelly. The jelly suffocated the larvae and eggs on top of Kelly’s mosquito bite
It’s not the first time a woman’s mosquito bite hid something creepier, the Daily Mail reports.
Rochelle Harris, 27, had just returned home to England from a vacation in Peru when she began hearing strange scratching sounds in her ear.
At first, doctors thought she might have a minor ear infection, but when the symptoms did not get better, further investigations revealed the shocking truth.
“My Mum asked her ‘Can you see what it is?”” Harris recalled. “And the doctor said, ‘If you don’t mind I’d prefer to speak to the registrar before I tell you anything.’”
“My Mum said, ‘Please tell us,’” Kelly added. “And that’s when the doctor said, ‘You’ve got maggots in your ear.’ I burst into tears instantly.”
Harris said she was terrified.
“I was very scared,” she said. “I wondered if they were in my brain. I thought to myself, ‘This could be very, very serious.’”
While further scans revealed no damage, it appeared the maggots had laid eggs. Doctors were eventually able to treat Harris and now she’s well.
Sources: LittleThings, Daily Mail / Photo Credit: Nancy Heise via Wikipedia, Discovery via Daily Mail
